UP#2: The illusion of time (Part I)

I’m sorry I haven’t written for two weeks; I’ve been caught up in family stuff, and in all, it’s just been too hectic to try and find time to blog after all that. How ominous that the topic is about time and I failed to apply it. A lesson in life, eh?

Remember the post called ‘UP#2 and #3 teaser: The illusion of inertia’? Well, this is a follow up on that – the perspective of inertial progress invokes one of the principles we’re here to talk about – that is, time. I think that this is sorely limited, however. There are many other perspectives on time that we’ll be approaching at a later date, and I separated them intentionally because your eyes will strain if you have the patience to finish this lot. Anyway, a great many thanks for the readership and support that you’ve shown!

We all need more time. I think many people will come to agree that there’s just not enough time. Other things you find in life can be infinitely accessible. For instance, if you don’t have money, you can always make more of it. If you have flour and other ingredients (sorry, folks, not a food expert, can’t even make toast without burning it XD), you can always make more bread. But, however we try, we just CAN’T make more time. Or can we?

I don’t pretend to be an expert on time. Because I don’t even know what time is. Is it free flowing, sequential, like water falling down a cascading waterfall? Is it circular, ever-warping in an infinite continuum? Or is it as is, not measurable or definable by any method, tangible or intangible known to us? Honestly, I don’t have a clue. But I have a few ideas when it comes to perceiving time.

You see, right, I think it remains a fact that we can’t create more time. Like, you can’t just make time appear out of thin air. You make omelettes out of eggs, but the essence of time? No idea. Therefore, we can only redirect our focus to something that we do have control over – our perceptions of time.

Have you ever felt that time is passing slowly while you’re, hmm, let’s say, awaiting the results of your medical report? Or it passed too quickly during a party? That’s the point of entry that we’re going to use, probably because it’s also the only one we’ve got. While this load of stuff about time may just seem like a bunch of abstractions, don’t worry. What we discuss below is quite concrete, I can guarantee that as much. XD

But it’s exactly that. It’s a perception. As we all know, our perceptions can change at alarming rates. For example, you’re at a café sipping coffee only to find that the stranger sitting opposite you is munching on a piece of toast you bought. You glare at her, who only smiles annoyingly in return. You then take the other piece of toast and masticate it. There’s only one left on the plate and you scowl at the woman. She then breaks it in half and offers it to you. You snatch it from her proffered hand, and stuff it in your mouth. When she stands up and leaves, you check the time, and realize that you’ve already ate the toast (that you bought an hour ago, and a waiter took it away, which you absent-mindedly ignored) and have been sitting in the café for 45 minutes before the woman joined you. Then you throw embarrassed glances around you, wishing to yourself, ‘gee, how nice of her! I hope she forgives me for taking all that!’

As you can see, it’s only ever you that’s controlling what you’re seeing. If you simply look from a different point, you might find something different, often surprising. That’s what we’re attempting to do here with time: twisting the immediate truth.